Turn about is fair play?

I felt a confusing mix of emotions. Along with a slight smile of amusement, I also felt an instinctive indignation as I digested it on a personal level. “This is a perfect example of the media pushing beauty standards that cause women to have low self esteem and form eating disorders,” I said to myself. Then I felt annoyance because the commercial only represented the reality of how many young men act. Other thoughts were to roll my eyes at the hypocrisy, (for the young men accessing the women’s figures are drinking Coca-Cola, which isn’t exactly healthy), and then I ended up wondering how I can prevent my own sons from objectifying women as they grow closer and closer to adolescence.

After a few minutes, I suddenly remembered another old commercial, also put out by the Coca-Cola company.

Now the tables have turned. In this video we have a group of women objectifying a man yet it didn’t strike the same nerve in me. Is this natural or hypocritical? Is turn about fair play? Should we just smile and not take either video so seriously?

One time that I belonged to a “Latino Coalition”, they had a guest speaker a white guy that owns a car dearlship and that according to the coalition presidente, this guy “knew” how to target the latino market by presenting girls in bikini in his latino commercial, but he did not do that in his english commercials, because according to him, he had realized that hispanic men like that, I was very offended by that as a woman and started thinking if the owner had been a woman, would she show men in small swim suites?

@ Micky – That would have upset me, too! Women in bikinis do not just attract Latino men – it attracts ALL men – shows what he knows.

I just wonder how men would feel if women were the leaders in the corporate world and we were constantly enticing female shoppers with images of muscle men with no regard to how it made male shoppers feel. If the media was as saturated with such images, I think men would eventually begin to feel the pressure of “beauty expectations” and they might understand what it’s like. Of course, men are so rarely judged on their looks. They can be old and “ugly” in conventional terms, yet they can still be considered successful by society.

Can I make that 11.30 am appointment LOL…Oops sorry just trying to be funny. Since I get to see both the commericals, I would take it with a pinch of salt :) But on the other hand, besides Coke there are alot of other commercials that tend to associate women in certain kind of categories.

@ Shoinge – LOL. No need to apologize for your joke. You’re right that many, many, many companies use sex to sell their products and Coca-Cola certainly isn’t uniquely “guilty”. It’s a reflection of a bigger societal problem. They’re in it to make money, and they do it well… But what does it say about the society as a whole that they can be convinced to buy a product for something as primitive as an attractive member of the opposite sex? … I’d like to think that most of us are more intelligent consumers than that!

6 of one, half-dozen of the other. I really don’t have to much of a problem with the sex-sells thing… as long as they throw some in for us girls once in a while (11:30 is now my favourite time of day).

There are those Gillette razor blade commercials (aimed at men, I assume) that must make most men feel inadequate too. Those are some, hot, muscled, SMOOTH young men (must be photo manipulated, they don’t even have pores!) getting out of the shower to shave in their high-end uber-cool bathrooms. So they have the physical stigma as well as the the financial pressures to worry about to get the hot ladies!

@ Pol – Good point about those razor commercials and the poreless young men. LOL. But I will argue that women definitely get hit harder as far as the amount of images they are bombarded with on a daily basis. (To argue on your side a moment though, I recently read that Men’s Health magazine hasn’t had a hairy chest on their cover for a very long time.)